The viability of new tornado warning sirens fired from a National Weather Service satellite is being debated in Lubbock.

And at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, at City Hall, a citizens advisory committee will look at the evidence.

The renewed interest in sirens follows concerns that mass warnings sent to cellphones could fail because of bandwidth limitations.

According to Jay Leeson, chairman of the Municipal Facilities and Public Safety Subcommittee, his group will meet a day earlier for a work session before taking its findings to the general committee.

“I’ve got city emergency managers from here to Nashville saying that they use sirens as their front line,” Leeson said of his research into the possibilities of tornado warning systems.

“In a 16-state region from Tornado Alley all the way up to South Dakota, and all the way over to Georgia, up the Ohio River Valley back up to South Dakota — in that whole entire region there is only one municipality with 200,000 people that does not have sirens — it’s us.”

Leeson said Abilene is considering sirens that can be triggered by satellite, and Amarillo has a system in operation that can be manually operated from a command center for each city sector in the path of a tornado.

“I had a conversation with Kevin Starbuck, the emergency manager up in Amarillo, and Kevin said that in the tornado they had last May, his sirens were a warning system throughout the tornado.”

Leeson said, “They had gradually taken out their civil defense air raid sirens and replaced them with newer technology. He said he sat in central command and as that storm went over the heart of the city — over the entire city, across it — he was just sounding sirens in zones, just one zone at a time. He didn’t have to fire the whole entire city, just the (segment) that was affected.”

Leeson is a proponent of the new technology, and speaks about it publicly.

“I spoke at (Councilman) Todd Klein’s little town hall meeting last Saturday, and people who were adamantly opposed to sirens before I gave them my report, afterwards said they never heard it described like that. They said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s something we can do.’ ”

He added, “These are good people, they just need to understand what we’re really talking about here.”

Leeson emphasized, “This is not Cold War technology, this is satellite-capable mechanisms. This is not the big yellow drum on top of a pole.”

ray.westbrook@lubbockonline.com

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Citizens Advisory Committee meeting

■ When: 7:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 27

■ Where: City Hall, 1625 13th St.

■ What: The Citizens Advisory Committee will hear a report about tornado sirens from the Public Safety Subcommittee.